No one can reasonably conclude that sons who become gay always make their fathers distant rather than the other way around. People who do conclude that either haven’t thought about it properly or are simply looking for an excuse to dismiss a theory they don’t like.

Both arguments should equally be dismissed as the Fallacy of Converse Accident. Just because either case happens for 1 individual does not make it true for all individuals, either for his case, or for the opposite.

When Quo says:

Regarding the reasons why I don’t use my real name, I find that a rather eyebrow-raising question coming from you, given that you have certainly shown that you appreciate the virtues of online anonymity, but I guess I shouldn’t say any more about that.

This should be dismissed as an Ad Hominem attack against an individual in an attempt to lend his argument more weight by discrediting his opposition as morally questionable.

When Quo says:

What they mean when they say that the evidence “fails to support the idea of the overly close, seductive mother” is that the evidence doesn’t clearly support the idea, but as the studies have produced inconsistent results, it doesn’t really refute it either.

It was that the argument that theories about how male homosexuality is caused to a poor relationship with the father are discredited because they supposedly do not fit African Americans doesn’t stand up well when you consider that one of the best-known proponent of those theories had extensive experience with blacks, and in fact probably based his theories about homosexuality originally on his experience with black patients.

This can be dismissed as supposition. Without supporting evidence to support the claim of basis for the author’s material, this is pure conjecture. Please provide quotes from the Author that indicate that material on 1 subject was predicated by work on the other.

When Quo says:

You wrote, “your assertion that because you think your distant father realtionship wasn’t due to your gayness lends no credence to your theory that distant fathers cause gayness.”

Yes it does, because that is the only plausible alternative, given that there’s a statistical relationship between the two things.

This should be dismissed as Argument by Lack of Imagination. Just because you can’t think of any alternate possibilities does not make the one you did think of true.

When Quo says:

“The author of that book presented no evidence whatsoever that the absent fathers of the black community caused a spike in the level of gayness amongst blacks which is still a gaping hole in your theory.”

I never said it did, but in any case, how would you know? Did you read it? I can see that you aren’t especially interested in the history of psychoanalysis. No one says that you have to be, but your lack of interest in it does not help you formulate a convincing criticism of it.

This should be dismissed as another Ad Hominem attack against Priya. Quo does not prove his point other than by attacking Priya by claiming she is uneducated in a field in which he has not provided his own credentials.

Quo says:

You provide no proof for your assertions about the “majority.” Actually it is common among conservative Christians or ex-gay movement supporters to hear that homosexuality is due to choice, or to sexual abuse, or demonic possession, or what have you. Not everyone in that camp thinks it’s due to bad parenting. And of course, you wouldn’t know what individual, personal motivations Throckmorton might happen to have.

Two Ad Hominem attacks, one against Burr, and a second, against Dr Throckmorton. Are we seeing a pattern here? Quo also asks us to reject Burr’s claims on the basis of lack of evidence, but provides no evidence to back his claim about what is “common” regarding Christian ideology.

Your argument now seems to consist of “you can’t prove that absent/distant fathers cannot be a factor in the development of homosexuality in some men.”

If that is your argument, you are correct. I cannot.

I also cannot disprove that Gerber strained peas are a factor.

]]>By: Williamhttp://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/08/05/13926/comment-page-2#comment-47953
Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:49:53 +0000http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/?p=13926#comment-47953All right, Quo, so it hasn’t been proved that “distant fathers cannot be a factor in the development of homosexuality”. It hasn’t been proved that all sorts of other things “cannot be a factor in the development of homosexuality” either, a point that I’ve already made ad nauseam. (Absolute proof outside the realm of pure logic is, of course, impossible.)

Obviously distant fathers can’t be THE cause of homosexuality, since there are plenty of homosexual men who didn’t have distant fathers, e.g. me. But you wish, for whatever reason, to believe that a distant father was a factor in the development of YOUR homosexuality.

So convinced as you are of this, why do you keep coming on here trying to convince everyone else of it? Are you challenging them to disprove your belief? Even if they’re sceptical, as I am, you must know perfectly well that they couldn’t come anywhere near to disproving it, as they know practically nothing about you.

Or, since you clearly think that you homosexuality is a negative trait, for which you want to blame your parents, are you trying to convince the rest of us who are gay that OUR homosexuality is a negative trait, for which we ought to blame our parents? You won’t achieve it.

“If I am understanding this debate correctly, Fisher and Greenberg failed to find correlation between male homosexuality and “the overly close, seductive mother”. If correlation isn’t present then any notion of causation is refuted.”

What they found, if I recall correctly, was that studies produced inconsistent results, and that firm conlusions on this point were thus not possible. Look it up for yourself if you really care.

“All things being equal, we should see that blacks have a disproportionately high occurance of gay people, followed by Hispanics and then whites.”

All things being equal, maybe, but things are never equal in reality. This argument about blacks was first made by Judd Marmor in his 1980 book “Homosexual Behavior”. It may be useful to recall what he said there:

“Moreover, if the strong-mother/weak-or-absent father constellation were a determining factor, one would expect to find a much higher incidence of male homosexuality among urban blacks, since life in the black ghetto has for decades produced a large number of broken homes in which the mother was the mainstay of family life. However, there is no evdience that the incidence of homosexuality is any greater in black men than in white men. This highlights the fact that there are other acculturating factors that probably play a significant role in the development of homosexual behavior. For example, as Harlow and Harlow (1965) have shown, good peer relationships can often override the negative effect of a poor mother relationship. The numerous, readily available peer relationships of ghetto life may present compensating models for masculine identification that make up for the absence of such models within the family. In addition, the mores of ghetto life do not usually reflet the sexual puritanism and antiheterosexual bias that so often characterizes the background of middle-class homosexuals, both male and female.” p. 11

Note that Marmor does not conclude, in his version of this argument, that the apparent fact that there isn’t more homosexuality among blacks discredits the idea that distant fathers sometimes play a role in the development of homosexuality. His suggestion appears to be that good peer relationships make up for the consequences of that, which is as likely to be true as any other theory.

Unfortunately, Marmor’s argument was popularized, in a greatly over-simplified and dumbed-down form and without his careful qualification, in the 1990s by gay writers, notably by Simon LeVay and Andrew Sullivan, neither of whom acknowledged Marmor as their source, though they must have been perfectly aware of him.

“But the 2005 CDC report shows that blacks do not report more same-sex attraction, behavior, or identity.”

Congratulations, Timothy. That’s the very first time in my experience that anyone has ever mentioned actual evidence to support the claim that there isn’t more homosexuality among blacks, something that people usually expect everyone to accept simply in the name of political correctness.

Whatever the reason for this finding, it doesn’t show that distant fathers cannot be a factor in the development of homosexuality if there is still an overall correspondence between the two phenomena, which Fisher and Greenberg (who were reviewing numerous studies) found there was.

]]>By: Quohttp://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/08/05/13926/comment-page-2#comment-47949
Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:59:30 +0000http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/?p=13926#comment-47949Actually, I meant that Ellis debunked that idea in the 1960s, not the 1690s – serves me right for making such a long post, one always makes some typos. It was in his book “Homosexuality: Its Causes and Cure”. His arguments there were very similar to those Byne made almost thirty years later (both of them used imprinting as an example to show that behavior patterns that aren’t inborn cannot necessarily be changed). It wouldn’t suprise me if Byne used Ellis as a source without acknowledgement.
]]>By: Quohttp://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/08/05/13926/comment-page-2#comment-47948
Mon, 17 Aug 2009 06:49:53 +0000http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/?p=13926#comment-47948Priya,

“However the environment includes much more than parental nuruturing, when you’re trying to claim that that is the major force in determining a person’s gayness you’re on mighty thin ground given all the studies that suggest biology and natal envirnment play the predominant role.”

I did not claim that parental nurturing was the major force in determining a person’s “gayness.” I said it was one influence among others. You imply that studies have proven that “biology and natal envirnment play the predominant role”, but, unsurprisingly, you provide no evidence for that claim whatever. In any case, it wouldn’t show that having a bad relationship with one’s father was not a factor of some kind even if biology was “predominant”, whatever you suppose that means.

“Talk to a geneticist, they’ll tell you that the racial differences are very superficial and that genetically we’re all very similar. If as you claim fatherless causes gayness black men would have a much higher rate of gayness – there is no evidence whatsoever to support your theory.”

That “genetically we’re all very similar” is just a vague general truth that does not contradict my point. There is no reason whatever why genes that might predispose people to homosexuality must be present with exactly the same frequency in all racial groups – given that no racical group is precisely the same as any other genetically, it would be very surprising if they were.

Just to repeat myself, I did not claim that “fatherlessness causes gayness”; that was your caricature of what I did claim, which was that fatherlessness was one important factor among numerous others. I really don’t need to rebut your suggestion about what “must” be true if that were the case, as it was not what I argued.

“just because many gays decided to come out of the closet in no way suggests that there were more gays than there were before. ”

I never said it proved that, but it is perfectly compatible with what one might expect if that were the case.

“Finally, there were many social movements in the 60’s that rejected traditional society, do you want to argue that all those were caused by fatherlessness as well?”

No, that would be stupid – just as suggesting that the idea that one social movement that rejected traditional society may have been partly caused by fatherlessness cannot be correct unless all social movements that rejected traditional society were caused by fatherlessness is stupid.

“A swing of the hips or a swaggered shoulder is enough for many casual observers to identify a man’s sexual orientation, according to a study published in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.”

Do you really suppose that most homosexual men swing their hips or swagger their shoulders in a way that makes it obvious that they are homosexual? I’m homosexual, and I know that I don’t do that. I also know that most homosexual men don’t do it. Not only have we no natural inclination not to behave that way, we do have an interest in not behaving in a way that makes our sexuality apparent to casual observers.

So what that one study got published in the “Journal of Personality and Social Psychology” – plenty of rubbish gets published. It had a tiny sample size of eight people -worthless from a scientific perspective, because there’s no way it could be representative of such a large and diverse group as homosexual men. Even if the study had not been rubbish, one study, even a good one, would hardly show that something was “well documented.”

I wonder if you really take this seriously,

““There’s reason to think that gay people can’t conceal their homosexuality,” says Michael Bailey, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University.”

Michael Bailey is an idiot who has no credibility as a commentator on homosexuality. Nothing he says should be taken seriously; his comments there are just more dumbed-down rhetoric for popular consumption, and I’m not sure he even cares whether what he is saying is true or not. It’s perfectly obvious that gay people can and do conceal their homosexuality. How does he suppose that so many homosexuals would be able to serve in the military for years without discovery (to take just one example) if what he is saying were true?

You also said, “Try watching OUT TV or a similar gay channel for a while, its readily apparent to any honest person that you can usually pick out a gay person from their mannerisms, speech, interests, etc’, and, “Personally I’ve never met a gay person that didn’t have stereotypical gay aspects to their behavior, interests, etc.”

Nothing of the kind is apparent. I have spent enough time among homosexuals, and have enough experience of life generally, to know that what you are saying about homosexuals is false. Gay people do not always or even “usually” have mannerisms, speech or anything else that makes their homosexuality apparent, one rubbishy study with a tiny sample size notwithstanding.

You tell me that I am “quite dishonest” to claim that I was not recognizibly gay because I admitted to being unathletic, ill, physically weak, and so on…I wasn’t particularly masculine”. Do you think that all gay people are unathletic, ill, and all those other bad things, and that non-gay people are not?

“Nicolosi makes it very clear that he believes if a gay person develops healthy non-sexual relationships with same sex people that their gayness will be cured.”

So? That has nothing to do with what i argued. I don’t have healthy non-sexual relationships with same sex people and never said I did.

“The failure of virtually everone who has ever tried to change their orientation suggests that it is inborn, not a feature of some bad psychological development which could be remediated.”

It suggests nothing of the sort. The idea that people must be born gay if they can’t change it is a classic fallacy that has been debunked many times, by Albert Ellis back in the 1690s for instance, and by William Byne in the 1990s, in one rather well known and widely read article. Look it up.

(You’re trying to argue that if change from homosexuality isn’t usually possible, then NARTH’s theories about what causes it would have to be wrong – but that’s an illogical argument, no matter how convenient you find it).

]]>By: Ben in Oaklandhttp://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/08/05/13926/comment-page-2#comment-47643
Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:51:14 +0000http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/?p=13926#comment-47643Jason and Regan: I think you have both also hit upon the real problem with the Nickaloosi hypothesis, what it is really intended to promote.

There is a direct line between the weak- absent-father meme and the every-child-derserves-a-mother-and-father meme so prominent in the gay marriage debate

The answers are always in the subtext. Gay men are not real men and cannot be real fathers. Real fathers don’t turn their kids gay. The gays are trying make your children gay. they’re gonna get your children.

Jason wrote: Again, one would expect the amount of cumulative male bonding taking place over the course of a decade or so to be more than sufficient to naturally reverse course on homosexuality.

The more cumulative mail bonding I have, the queerer i get. fancy that.

]]>By: Jason Dhttp://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/2009/08/05/13926/comment-page-2#comment-47633
Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:14:21 +0000http://www.boxturtlebulletin.com/?p=13926#comment-47633“As a previously married man, and one who has had most in common with other men who were/are married, I’m curious to know what studies support your claims.”

I have none, I’m basing it on personal experience. As someone who once claimed to be bisexual, I certainly lived up to the cliche that “bisexual” is often a baby step out of the closet. Not always true, of course, but I’ve found true bisexuals to be rarer than gays and more rare among men than women.

That’s based on my personal experience.

My personal experience leads me to believe that there is nearly as much bisexuality among males as among females. [The fluidity of female sexuality, I believe, has been extensively documented and supported.]

and your comments are based on yours. If you’re not going to bust out some statistics, don’t expect me to.